When I want to record a Public Domain book, I often buy a cheap hardback or paperback copy on eBay or Abebooks. I don’t mind destroying the book to create my PDF.
The first step is disassembly:
- Drew removes the book cover with a box cutter.
- He then would slice a sheet or a small group of sheets away from the adhesive binding in the spine of the book until all sheets are free from the binding.
- He would pull off any glue residue and hanging chads.
- To make the pages a consistent size for my scanner, he repeatedly would align small groups of pages in a regular paper cutter and trim the binding edge.
This process could take 45 minutes or so, depending on the book page count and the strength of the binding adhesive.
We just bought this 12″ heavy duty paper trimmer which drastically reduces the time needed for steps 3 and 4 above.
After removing the book cover, this time Drew inserted the bound pages into the 12″ cutter. With one smooth motion, this trimmer chopped off the adhesive spine, leaving all the pages loose with an even, straight edge ready for feeding into my scanner!
This disassembly job only took about 1 minute! It took more time to position and clamp the book into the cutter than to liberate the pages from the book cover.
I’ll scan the pages in my trusty Epson ES-500W scanner (replaced by the ES-500W II). It scans 35 double-sided pages per minute, collating the pages into a PDF.
I do have some extremely rare books for which I paid too much money to consider disassembling them. I’ll leave those books intact and use the CamScanner app to photograph their pages and create my PDF. The original books can hold court on my bookshelf for years to come.
Regardless of whether I made the PDF using my scanner or the app, I run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and file compression on it. You’ll find my PDF Optimization instructions in Step 3 of Planning Your Trip to Public Domain World.
With an optimized PDF as my script, I’m now ready to prep and record the book.
